The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic.txt

This is Audible.
The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic, written by John Michael Kuchinski, narrated
by Trevor Klinger.
The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic.
I used to be a professor, and one of the disciplines I taught was symbolic logic.
I have long since stopped being a professor, since it was obviously a total crock.
But now, I run a tutoring business that involves me helping other people with their homework,
including symbolic logic homework.
Back when I was a philosophy professor and grad student, I really tried to see legitimacy
in the discipline of symbolic logic and actually generated some meaningful results in it.
But there was always something off about it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the
problem.
And then, just a moment ago, when I was finishing up a round of logic homework, for some poor
sap, it hit me.
What they call logic in universities is the ultimate bureaucrat discipline.
There I was, doing utterly time-consuming and generally wasteful exercises for some client,
who, like all my clients, knew that it simply wasn't in his interest to jump through more
bureaucratic hoops than he had to.
There I was, as I was saying, and I had just spent thirty minutes putting in a lot of little
idiot notations, along the lines of Modus Tollens, lines two, five, and double negation, line one,
monkey idiot, fake math bullshit.
Another thing I had done was complete some truth table-based proof, another favorite of
logic professors.
Eighty-five percent of what I was doing had no substance.
It was purely procedural, purely bureaucratic.
And this time I saw it with the requisite simplicity and clarity.
I looked back at the people I knew during undergraduate and graduate school who were into logic, and
they were all broken, empty husk bureaucrats.
Quasi-smart, but not actually smart, maybe a little bit actually smart, but what they had
in the way of intelligence was more about what they didn't have.
In other words, they lacked so much in terms of intellect, or if not intellect, then personality,
that the only part of them that was still functional was the logic part, which, for that reason, predominated.
They all ended up becoming cipher lawyers.
The other thing is that the term logic is a serious misnomer in this context.
What they call logic in college isn't logic.
Real logic is about organizing statement sets in a way that exposes dependence relations.
What they call logic at universities is about rooting through the leavings of some long-gone
and only semi-successful attempts on some person's part to organize some statement set.
What they call logic, in other words, is the study of someone else's attempt to construct
a particular system of logic, which is not logic.
Once the statement set in question has been duly logicized, there is quite trivially nothing
left for the logician to do, since all the intelligence involving work has at that point been automated away.
Whatever work there is left, it's for the robots, and that's just who does it, except that in this context,
the robots are human robots, bureaucrats in other words.
There was a computer program designed around 20 years ago called Tarski's World, which was an attempt to automate logic.
It was the worst conceivable failure in the history of automation.
It was far more difficult to learn how to use their cantankerous software than it was to do the problems the old-fashioned way.
And what they were automating had already been automated, since to construct a logic is to automate the making of inferences.
So the very idea of automating logic is absurd.
What the authors of this program were doing was automating the automating of making inferences,
which meant that the student spent hours learning some junk program that insulated him from logic, instead of instructing him in it.
Second, it wasn't even logic that was being automated, it was some fragment of some specific logic, which as it turns out was a total bust.
But, these philosophy professors kept on lingering over that unburied carcass, because they couldn't come up with anything else.
Also, the algorithms of which that particular system of logic availed humanity were useless.
Not in the sense that they gave the wrong answer, but in the sense that applying them took far heftier resources of intellect and energy than simply solving the target problems directly.
Plus, they only apply to artifacts, and the process of converting a statement set into the requisitely artificial form is far more involved intellectually than whatever it is one supposedly figures out by using the algorithms in question.
Try using truth tables to evaluate some actual argument.
It's not worth it.
It's easier to do it by longhand, so to speak.
Plus, on the rare occasions that truth tables can be applied, what they tell you is Mickey Mouse, and by using them, you will simply divert your attention from matters of substance.
Which is the very definition of mathematical failure.
If an algorithm makes it harder to solve the problem that it solves, then there is no use for it.
It is mathematical garbage.
The discipline stuck around partly because a bunch of pencil-pushing geeks posing as thinkers were in the comfort zone with it, because it's not a real discipline.
It's just a collection of bureaucrat geek protocols masquerading as one.
This has been The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic, written by John Michael Kuchinski, narrated by Trevor Klinger, copyright 2020 by John Michael Kuchinski, production copyright by John Michael Kuchinski.
Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program.